Cash on Hand

 

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr Instapundit reports on his recent experience in a market at a time when the computer network was down:

So, shopping at the fresh market tonight, we were among the very few to buy groceries, because their computer network was down and they couldn’t process credit or debit cards. They couldn’t even accept checks because those are run through an ACH payment system rather than deposited in the old way. We, however, were able to pay and get out, something only a couple of other customers could do. (One older guy, and a couple of teenaged girls who said “we rock it old school with cash,” which I thought was hilarious.) Most people didn’t carry enough cash for groceries.

Two lessons: (1) The “cashless society” is less robust than cash; and (2) Always carry enough cash to buy groceries, a meal out, and a tank of gas. Just in case.

Good advice.  But how will this work if/when the globalists impose a digital currency on us?

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What is Project Icebreaker? (Hint: it's about digital currency)

What is Project Icebreaker?  What is the BIS?  Brandon Smith answers both questions at InfoWars.  First, two major take-aways re: the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs):

In a cashless society most people would be dependent on digital products for exchanging goods and labor, and this would of course mean the end of all privacy in trade. Everything you buy or sell or work for in your life would be recorded, and this lack of anonymity could be used to stifle your freedoms in the future.

With CBDCs in place and no physical cash in existence, your savings will never be truly yours and you’ll never be able to hold your purchasing power in your hands. The means of exchange would be bottle-necked by the banks, and governments would have the option to freeze your ability to transact.

And now for two answers:

. . . The Orwellian nature of CBDCs cannot be overstated. In a cashless society most people would be dependent on digital products for exchanging goods and labor, and this would of course mean the end of all privacy in trade. Everything you buy or sell or work for in your life would be recorded, and this lack of anonymity could be used to stifle your freedoms in the future.

. . .

It’s important to understand that central bankers are moving at breakneck speed to develop and introduce digital currencies. It’s not a matter of experimentation, they already have these systems ready to implement. The Federal Reserve’s instant transfer program “FedNow” is set to debut this July, which is not a CBDC but it is an intermediary step towards instituting CBDCs in the near term.

In my investigations of various CBDC programs and how quickly they are progressing I came across an interesting program called “Project Icebreaker” being run by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). For those not aware, the BIS is a globalist institution with a clandestine past known as the “central bank of central banks.” It is the policy making hub for most of the central banks in the world. If you ever wondered how it was possible for so many national central banks to operate in tandem with each other instead of acting in the interests of the countries they reside in, the BIS is the answer. In other words, organizations like the Federal Reserve are not necessarily loyal to Americans or to American officials, they are loyal to the dictates of the BIS.

The BIS is at the forefront of the movement towards the adoption of CBDCs. . . .

. . . Project Icebreaker in particular grabbed my attention for a number of reasons. The BIS describes the project as a foreign exchange clearing house for Retail CBDCs (retail CBDCs are digital currencies used by the regular public and businesses), enabling the currencies to be traded from country to country quickly and efficiently. This is accomplished using the “Icebreaker Hub”, a BIS controlled mechanism which facilitates data transfers for an array of transactions while connecting banks to other banks. . . .

Read the full report here.   This blog has previously posted on the subject of digital currency, e.g., here and here.

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Why pay cash?

As global digital currency looms ominously in our future, here’s a meme I saw the other day at Bookworm Room that shows one reason that cash is better than digital (or any credit card):

Click to embiggen or go to the link above and scroll down.

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Going cashless: weaponizing the banks

 

Digital dollars? Sounds innocuous enough, but it’s not.  In a recent column at Based Underground, Claudio Grass points out the dangers in the imminent move to digital currency. Here’s a sample:

As Reuters reported on the 15th of November, “Global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup Inc , HSBC Holdings Pl, Mastercard Inc and Wells Fargo & Co are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed’s innovation center, they said in a statement. The project, which is called the regulated liability network, will be conducted in a test environment and use simulated data, the New York Fed said. The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.”

. . .

[T]he stakes are too high for people to ignore this development. Whoever controls the money, controls everything and the rise of CBDCs [Central Bank Digital Currency] threatens to make that control absolute, closing whatever little “loopholes” of freedom may still exist today.

To most citizens, savers and taxpayers, the transition to a digital dollar might seem harmless, or even beneficial, given that most of the population today associates digitalization with convenience and speed. Indeed, if one doesn’t understand the ins and outs of monetary history, of fiat money and of digital currencies, this concept appears totally innocuous. But even for many who do understand these things, it might seem like such a step would really make no difference. Junk money is junk money after all, be it physical or digital, it’s still backed by nothing, right?

Well, that is right indeed, but there’s a lot more to it. While the currency itself will continue to be worthless, its digital form will come with a bunch of perks and advantages for central planners. As Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy and economics at Cornell University, puts it:

One should recognize that the CBDC creates new opportunity for monetary policy. If we all had CBDC accounts instead of cash, in principle it might be possible to implement negative interest rates simply by shrinking balances in CBDC accounts. It will become a lot easier to undertake helicopter drops of money. If everybody had a CBDC account, one could easily increase the balance in those accounts.

What this essentially means is that any choice that remains and any degree of financial sovereignty that is left in the present system could be easily wiped out by CBDCs. And its not only financial freedom that’s at stake: these centralized digital currencies can be used by governments to monitor, to control and even to directly punish dissenters, by blocking transactions, freezing their accounts or seizing they assets. Some might find that farfetched, but those are probably the same people who thought that China’s “Social Credit System” was implausible too, right up to the moment it was actually implemented.

Full article is here.

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Cashless & Jobs memes

 Two memes seen at Bookworm Room: 

and . . .

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